I live on a private housing estate, parking managed by Secure A Space Ltd, the clutch went on my car (a VW Golf) and I was given an Enterprise hire car (a Ford Focus) as a courtesy car by the AA. The last thing on my mind was parking permits as i contemplated a hefty repair bill, so I parked the Focus on my estate, perfectly legitimately given that I am a permit holder, then when I came out next morning realised that i'd forgotten to transfer my parking permit to the hire car and I had a PCN under my windscreen wiper.

Given that it was a hire car, I appealed to PPC via email ASAP and told them that I was the driver of the car at the time. The reason for this was that I didn’t want PPC going after the Registered Keeper (Enterprise) because Enterprise would probably have just paid the charge, added an admin fee then I’d have had to fight Enterprise for my money back.

For my appeal to the PPC, I used a template letter from http://www.parkingcowboys.co.uk. I didn’t bother telling PPC that I was a resident, I’m sure they wouldn’t have given a toss and I wanted to give them as little information as possible, I just wanted to keep them away from the RK.

Predictably, I lost the appeal to the PPC and had to make a POPLA appeal, whcih I won with help from the Pepipoo forum.

On the face of it, this company appeared to me to have been pretty good at playing it by the book in this case and seem to obey the Code Of Practise pretty well. When we dug deeper however, it turned out that their contractual documentation was in a mess and they may not have even had the legal right to be operating on the estate at all! Part of this was that the Residents Association seems to have overstepped its authority in contracting in the Private Parking Company (PPC), there is supposed to be clear permission from the landowner but there is not, but also the PPC itself has made errors within its own contracts and documentation.